The Trinity
A study of the historical doctrine of the Trinity.
I. Biblical Theological Development of Trinitarian Doctrine
And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
If the New Testament affirms monotheism, however, it is also the Christian claim that the Old Testament already anticipates some sort of plurality when three distinct actors appear on the stage of Israel’s history, sometimes even in the same scene, each identified as God.
The doctrine of the Trinity is very decidedly a doctrine of revelation. It is true that human reason may suggest some thoughts to substantiate the doctrine, and that men have sometimes on purely philosophical grounds abandoned the idea of a bare unity in God, and introduced the idea of living movement and self-distinction. And it is also true that Christian experience would seem to demand some such construction of the doctrine of God. At the same time it is a doctrine which we would not have known, nor have been able to maintain with any degree of confidence, on the basis of experience alone, and which is brought to our knowledge only by God’s special self-revelation. Therefore it is of the utmost importance that we gather the Scriptural proofs for it.
Central to the early development of Trinitarian thought was the simple fact that faithful Jews had come to believe that God had acted just as he had promised, but that the events of the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit had shed new light not only on the ministry and teaching of Jesus but on the whole history of redemption.
II. Historical-Theological Formulation
VIEWS OF THE TRINITY
Modalism and Subordinationism
• God is one person (the Father), manifested to us sometimes also as “Son” and “Spirit.” Subordinationists (and Arians) taught that the Son and the Spirit are inferior ontologically to the Father.
• Founder of Modalism: Sabellius (3rd c. Roman presbyter). Later proponents: Socinians, Unitarians. Origen and Eusebius were subordinationists, as were the Arians.
Orthodox Trinitarianism
• God is one in essence, three in persons.
• Hippolytus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, Council of Nicea (AD 325)
Tritheism
• God is three persons, with no unity of essence.
• Founders: John Philoponus, Eugenius of Seleucia. Later proponents: Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
Both Platonism and Aristotelianism maintained the priority of the one over the many, although they parsed this differently.
The Aristotelian objection would encourage Arianism. For Arius, a third-century Alexandrian presbyter, the Son was the first created being. “There exists a trinity (trias),” he said, “in unequal glories.” The Father is “the Monad,” so that “the Father is God [even] when the Son does not exist.” At this point, the line between heresy and Christianity was as thin as a vowel: Semi-Arians allowed that the Son and the Father were of a similar essence (homoiousios) but continued to deny that they were of the same essence (homoousios). Sabellius, a third-century presbyter in Rome, argued that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are simply “masks” or modes in which the one person of God is experienced by believers. Although Sabellius was excommunicated by the bishop of Rome in AD 220, Sabellianism—also known as modalism—has remained a recurring challenge in church history. The dominance of the one over the many, unity over plurality, is the common factor in all of these early departures from the Trinitarian faith.
The real innovation in the debate, with revolutionary implications in the history of both philosophy and theology, occurred when the fourth-century Cappadocian theologians (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea) introduced a distinction between ousia and hypostasis, the former referring to Aristotle’s deutera ousia and the latter to his prōtē ousia. “Persons” finally attained their own ontological status as something more than a subcategory of essence. Thus, faced with the fact of the incarnation, Christians could for the first time talk about persons as sharing in a common essence and yet related to each other as distinct individuals with their own properties of personal identity. This breakthrough turned out to have tremendous significance not only for the doctrine of the Trinity but for the concept of human personhood as well. Thus, the formulation of the third-century Latin father Tertullian, “one in essence, three in persons,” was given a deeper conceptual footing.
Differences between the churches of the East and the West are frequently exaggerated in our day, with Augustine often the target of criticism for a more Platonic concentration on the unity of the divine essence that threatened the genuine plurality of the persons. By contrast, the East developed its Trinitarian thinking by starting with the person of the Father rather than the shared essence, with the Spirit as well as the Son finding his origin in him.28 Consequently, the East has often suspected the West of exhibiting modalistic tendencies, while the West frequently worries that subordinationism (or tritheism) lurks in Eastern formulations.
Whereas Augustine tended to reduce the divine persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) to relations (fatherhood, sonship, bond of love), Reformed theologians emphasized that the persons were real and distinct in the fullest sense. Like Hilary, Calvin combined the Western emphasis on God’s essential unity—shared consubstantially, with no member ontologically subordinate or inferior to another—with the Eastern emphasis on the distinct reality and mutuality of the persons.
Essences do not enter into relationships, but the divine persons who share that essence do. We are addressed, judged, redeemed, and raised to everlasting life by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, who are one God
Identifying the three persons of the Trinity as real individuals certainly challenges a modalistic theory, but this term has its own baggage. The Roman statesman and Christian philosopher Boethius (480–524) defined person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (natures rationalis individua substantia). At least as John Zizioulas interprets the East’s concern, this definition (especially as applied to the persons of the Trinity) set in motion a theologically defective view of persons as autonomous individuals that reaches its fateful climax in modernity.32 But for the Cappadocians, “true personhood arises not from one’s individualistic isolation from others but from love and relationship with others, from communion.”
III. One and Many: Systematic-Theology Development
In adopting an analogical approach to divine and human persons, we must also recall that creatures are analogical of God rather than vice versa. As Athanasius reminds us, God’s fatherhood is not an analogy of human relations, but vice versa. Therefore, we cannot begin with our concept of ideal human personhood or society.
The most obvious point at which the doctrine of analogy is dissolved in Trinitarian thinking is with respect to the relationship between the immanent and economic p 301 trinities, which is basically the same as the distinction between God-in-himself and God-in-relation to us. It is one thing to say that the God who reveals himself in his external relations in the world is the same God who exists in the mystery of the internal relations of the Godhead, and quite another to say that this revelation is exhaustive or univocal. Here, as in all of our thinking about the Trinity, there are two dangers to be avoided: (1) the immensely popular move of simply collapsing the immanent into the economic Trinity (encouraged by Barth and many of his students) and (2) the tendency to allow for a contradiction between the hidden and revealed God (sometimes evident in Luther’s Bondage of the Will). We are on safer ground in saying that the revelation of the Trinity in the economy truly reveals the immanent Trinity (contra equivocity) but is always analogical rather than univocal
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit do not differ in their divine essence and attributes. However, there are also personal attributes that cannot be shared. For example, the Son cannot be eternally spirated (see “Reformed Contributions to Trinitarian Reflection,” pp. 288–94); neither the Father nor the Spirit can be begotten. The Son cannot be the origin of the Godhead, and the Spirit cannot be the incarnate Word. The danger of modalistic habits of thinking emerges when we correlate the Father with creation, the Son with redemption, and the Spirit with the new birth. Rather, in every external work of the Godhead, the Father is always the source, the Son is always the mediator, and the Spirit is always the perfecting agent.
IV. The Filioque
With the filioque debate (see also “East-West Tensions,” p. 284) the subtle differences between the East and the West opened into a formal schism. From ekporeuomai, the term procession refers to the mode by which the Spirit is related to the Father (the Greek view) or to the Father and the Son together (the Latin view). With the ecumenical consensus of East and West, the First Council of Constantinople (381) added to the creed agreed on at Nicea (325) the following phrase concerning the Holy Spirit (taken from Jn 15:26): “the Lord, the Giver of life, p 304 who proceeds from the Father.”
On the filioque question directly, the Reformed orthodox continued to defend the Western position. Calvin reminded readers of the passages in which the third person is identified in the scriptures as both the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Christ.
The most obvious point at which the doctrine of analogy is dissolved in Trinitarian thinking is with respect to the relationship between the immanent and economic p 301 trinities, which is basically the same as the distinction between God-in-himself and God-in-relation to us. It is one thing to say that the God who reveals himself in his external relations in the world is the same God who exists in the mystery of the internal relations of the Godhead, and quite another to say that this revelation is exhaustive or univocal. Here, as in all of our thinking about the Trinity, there are two dangers to be avoided: (1) the immensely popular move of simply collapsing the immanent into the economic Trinity (encouraged by Barth and many of his students) and (2) the tendency to allow for a contradiction between the hidden and revealed God (sometimes evident in Luther’s Bondage of the Will). We are on safer ground in saying that the revelation of the Trinity in the economy truly reveals the immanent Trinity (contra equivocity) but is always analogical rather than univocal.